A sharing by Ling Sing Lin
Orange Seahorses
When biologists captured a pair of orange pygmy seahorses in the Philippines, they brought them back to the Californian Academy of Sciences. There, after the birth of dull brown-colored babies, the biologists introduced purple coral sea fan (instead of orange coral sea fan they carried home from the Philippines) into the tank. The babies turned purple, not orange like their parents. This is obviously a self protective camouflage mechanism.
Camouflage
We are aware of many species of wildlife including chameleons and other lizards, crustaceans, insects, octopuses, fish, frogs, etc, which similarly disguise themselves for survival, by blending in with the environment. This includes not just the prey, but even the predator.
Army Camouflage
We are all familiar with army camouflage.
Makeup
Heavy makeup to mask facial defects or the effects of aging, is also camouflage.
Skin Colour
However, it is not that easy to camouflage our skin colour.
The story of a girl in a novel, Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult, depicts an intelligent and hardworking black girl in the US, who succeeded academically and graduated from Yale Nursing School. She chose to live in a white neighborhood to blend in, called Oreo in the American context (similar to banana in Singapore context). However, she was never accepted, facing daily indignities in shops, etc. After working competently for 20 years in a hospital’s Labour and Delivery unit as the only person of colour, she was unjustly accused of killing a white baby, and was treated as a criminal.
She was eventually exonerated as the baby was actually born with a congenital life threatening defect (MCADD) with very low blood sugar causing his death. The baby’s parents both carried a defective recessive gene for this condition. The baby’s father was a white supremacist, so it was a purely racially motivated incident.
Racial Prejudice
Although in Singapore we pride ourselves as living in harmony with all races, I recall a non-Chinese colleague telling me that Singapore is actually very racist. Because we are predominantly Chinese, we often forget that the racial minorities do feel certain injustices that we are blind to, similar to the whites in the US who do not experience such discrimination. There is a difference between active and passive racism. Voting for an Indian President is a positive step.
As usual, the author introduces a twist at the end of the story. The white supremacist father discovers that his wife, who looks white, is actually half black. She has never met her mother, who deserted her soon after she was born. Her mother was actually black by definition! The one drop of black blood legal racial classification was prominent in US in the 20th century.
lingsinglin
Dr Ling Sing Lin is a medical doctor by training. She worked in MOH HQ for many years, in policy making and administrative positions, until her retirement.
